


The Gospel of Sand

by moss28



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sex, Post-Outlast, Pre-Outlast 2, Psychological Horror, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Self-Harm, basically the same content warnings that come with outlast 2, miles survived as the host but he's having a rough time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-12-07 01:51:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18228299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moss28/pseuds/moss28
Summary: Miles finds his divinity. Val finds their freedom.





	The Gospel of Sand

**Author's Note:**

> Please see the content warnings in the tags before reading! This is set after the events of Outlast and before the events with Outlast 2, under the assumption that a few years passed between events as they did in realtime between the games.

     It starts in the winter. 

     He’s gotten used to the dream intrusions, the way he slips outside of himself in the dead of night. It’s better, at least, than when the wrath of his subconscious attachment is focused inward. And as long as he moves around, as long as he averts his eyes and the people around him remain anonymous, the guilt can be avoided. The person three motel rooms over never has to know that he’s been inside their head, that the haggard looking man they saw once or twice in the parking lot is the reason why they’ve woken up in a tear-streaked cold sweat the past few nights. He reasons that the discomfort is only temporary, that survival sometimes comes at the expense of someone or something else. Dog eat dog and all that.

But this is different.

     The Swarm doesn’t always make him sit in on the dreamwalking. Sometimes it lets him stay up while it prowls, carried onward by memories tinged with the sour stink of fear. Miles will go about his business while he pretends, staunchly, that there aren’t fingernails of awareness dragging along the inside of his skull, beckoning him like a radio that’s stuck between stations. He could tune in, if he wanted to, but he  _doesn’t_ want to.  _These_ dreams are different, though. They’re in his head, too, for one thing, meaning that he’s asleep – a landmark in and of itself. But usually when it’s  _his_ brain kicking into REM, it means the Walrider has remembered its affinity for the fear of its Host.

     These dreams are different, though, because they aren’t  _his_.

     At first it’s just a town, or what’s left of a town, nestled in a landscape rife with desolation. Cabins and cornfields like a stray blemish on the otherwise unmarked wilderness. But there’s a heaviness in the air that suggests something other than backwoods tranquility – the kind of low, electric hum he’d found buried beneath a mountain years ago. It’s enough to suggest  _purpose_ here, that this isn’t just the congealing nightmare of a stranger. It’s  _for him_ , even if it doesn’t  _belong_ to him. Not yet, anyway.

     The people in the town are vague, nebulous shapes, the landscape suspended while the figures run like blurry watercolor impressions around him. Only a few stand out. Big guy in a priest’s getup. A lean spindly-limbed woman. But the world seems to coalesce around one person in particular – cropped blonde hair, dark clothing, androgynous features. They look at him but they never seem to  _see_ him, even as he watches.

     And oh, does Miles  _watch_. It carries on for a few months, the bystander observation. At first it’s just the blonde and their care and love for their children, their adopted flock, but in this dream-world the love becomes warped. Cruelty in the guise of piety. The smiling faces of children contort into the agonized clenching of teeth, laughter to cries that permeates down to the bone right alongside the knife that draws through throats like melted butter. He wakes up with the smell of cooked flesh clogging his sinuses and the Swarm offers  _nothing_. Miles feels within it no satisfaction, no satiation. Just a cold sort of anticipation, like it’s  _waiting_. He tries digging for answers, pleading and reasoning and tunneling so far into his own psyche he can’t see sunlight anymore. But  _there’s nothing there_. It doesn’t even seem particularly interested in Miles’ response to the dreams.

     This is beyond him, somehow. A road stretched out before his feet only it’s shrouded in fog and he can’t see past the bend it takes into the trees. Something snaps incessantly at his heels and he has no choice but to advance, to push forward, to bide his time until the path presents itself.

     He starts trying to pinpoint where the dreams are taking him. It’s nearly impossible, though, without any geographic markers or leads. Logic turns him back to Murkoff, to the devil ever in disguise, as he tries piecing together recent projects and acquisitions because he can’t ignore the weight of the air in that town or the way it trills like it’s full of insects.

_I know that sound._

     Winter melts into a bloated and rainy spring and the dreams continue. There are others, now, aside from the lanky blonde. Other faces he can’t pin features to. The deaths grow increasingly brutal, and there’s pleasure to be found in the warm and sticky spilling of blood. The blonde laughs, teeth flashing in the moonlight, hands slick and dripping. Miles awakes, achingly hard and pitifully disoriented. The Swarm coils low in his gut, silent.

     Spring warms. Miles retreats inland from the East Coast, chasing leads that don’t feel like they really matter. During the day he feels tense and tight under his skin, his cells charged with the electric pressure that precedes a thunderstorm. At night he writhes, sweat-slicked and desperate, until he bolts awake feeling like a wild animal is loose in his chest. He no longer sees the town in his dreams. The group he’d been drawn to cut themselves loose from the others and drove their white-hot fanaticism deep underground. Abandoned mine shafts pierce into the earth, and now they thrum with the sweltering heat of overcooked life. If he’d once only  _suspected_ the work of outside forces, now he’s  _certain_ of it. The minds of the splinter group feel as though they’ve shifted to another frequency, pitched themselves to a warped tuning fork. Here, the air sings. And they look to  _him_ , now, though Miles is certain that whatever they see and whatever he’s become is no longer strictly  _himself_. He isn’t  _Miles_ in these dreams and he never had been.

 _You have a thousand names and I know none of them._  Mud and sticks plastered over blonde hair and they howl mercilessly, nerves alight with sharp, agonizing arousal.  _I know it is not God_. A feverish contortion of bodies, flesh ending where it began, consuming itself amid a keening, animalistic wail that feeds back and around, building building screaming  _I love you, I love you, I love you. Tell me what you want. Tell me your name and I am–_

     A gasp and he snaps back to awareness. Just himself. Just Miles. Only he was lying in bed before and now he’s standing. Realization dawns with sluggish reluctance. There’s a plastic takeout knife buried in the meat of his forearm and come drying in his sweatpants. Blood slides over the curve of his arm and patters onto the already splotchy motel carpet, leaving a pooling red – red, not black, which means it’s his own untainted blood – puddle at his feet. His hand is still curled around the knife’s handle, and with the slightest of inhales he yanks it free from his flesh. It stings in a way nothing has since he died. It’s then, knife in hand and stale arousal fading into something broken and distant, that he looks up.

     There are words scrawled on the wall, red and dripping. Blood. His blood. The edges of the first words are already drying, browning, on the chipped paint. He thinks for a moment that he recognizes the handwriting not as his own, but as that of a man known to splash his gory guidance across the walls of an asylum.         

                        **Then God showed me**  
          **the work that was to be forged**  
**upon the anvil of Temple Gate;**  
**a blade honed even to cut the**  
**throat of the spider-eyed lamb.**

     It’s indented like lines of poetry or the verses of a bible.

     Miles showers and changes, just barely managing to clean himself up before stuffing his clothing into a duffel bag and haphazardly knocking his toiletries off the counter and into the same receptacle. The sun is just beginning to creep across the threshold of the East when he all but sprints out to his rental car. Already he’s figuring out where to ditch it, which IDs and credit cards he’s going to use to cover his tracks so that there’s no connection between him and the trashed motel room.  _Temple Gate_. Somewhere in Arizona, based on the searching he did before he set the shower to running. A few days’ drive from where he is now, but he can hurry. He  _has to_ hurry. Something in the back of his mind, nestled between a thousand yesterdays and the singular present and the yawning maw of tomorrow is the knowledge that he needs to _be there_.

     There’s a prayer ringing in his ears as he leaves the parking lot and turns his car away from the rising sun. It comes with the fervor of multiple voices, all familiar to him, and it trickles like candle wax along the length of his spine. The nanites resting in the recesses of his marrow tremble minutely, and for a deliriously terrifying second, he wonders if he ever actually woke up this morning.

_I love you. I am yours._

     He fiddles with the radio and finds it riddled with static. The hair along his arms and across the back of his neck stand on end.

 _My flesh longs for your beautiful wraith._  

_Fuck me and cut my skin._

_My blood is filled with you and waiting to be set free._

     He wonders if he  _ever_ woke up or if he’s still dead on a white tiled floor in Lake County, Colorado.

_You love me. I am yours._

     The radio finally cuts to some over-produced pop song. The cacophony in his head settles to a dull roar. The tense knot between Miles’ shoulders persists.

     He drives on, towards Temple Gate and the shadowed horizon.


End file.
